Mirror Images
by pathera
Summary: There is a cost to war, and the Winchesters know it too well at the end. In two parallel universes, where two different costs are paid, there are two different endings. But the endings are mirror images, different yet the same. Two-shot, angsy, deathfic.
1. Sam

A/N: Hello all! I'm not quite sure where the idea for this came along, but it hit me after I came back from one of my classes this morning. I wrote it in a big chunk, though I did get interrupted a couple of times by one of my friends. Anyway, the basic concept is this: one setting, one OC who isn't really important, one scenario, two parallel universes. This is a two-shot and nothing more--I don't really have any clue how to expand it--and is angst-driven as well as a deathfic, so be warned if you hate angst or cry every time the boys die! This takes place at the end of the war, when the boys have won but as drastic costs to themselves. In the first chapter Sam faces a world without Dean; in the second one it is the reverse, Dean without Sam. Enjoy, and drop me a review if you like it!

Disclaimer: I don't own anything except the OC, and she's not really important, so I pretty much own nothing. Sucks, doesn't it?

Mirror Images

_I_

_Sam_

He limps into the diner, the bell on the door clanging cheerfully over his head. He slides into the nearest booth, his head down, his shaggy-hair falling limply against his forehead.

The waitress glides over. "Hello, sir. I'm Lydia and I'll be your server." She's used to strange folks coming in at all times of the night; it's what they get for keeping the diner open twenty-four-seven. Her eyes skim over that shaggy-hair, note the purple bruise on the side of his face, the long cut on his arm. She doesn't say anything about it, because it's not her business. "Would you like to hear our specials? Or would you like to look at the menu for a few minutes first?"

"I'll have coffee, thank you." He says, his voice pleasant to listen to but filled with something that she can't describe or understand. "And that's it."

"Right away." She says, still smiling even though he isn't looking at her. She walks away to get the coffee, leaving him staring at the checkered-print of the table. He traces the pattern with one long finger, silent, his head still down. When she returns he is still in that same position, finger trailing across the table, his head down, his shoulders slumped. She thinks that he would be tall if he didn't slump; instead he seems as though the world is pressing down on him.

She places the white mug in front of him and pours the hot, dark liquid. "Do you need anything else, sir?"

"No, thank you." His voice is so quiet that she has to lean forward to hear it. For a moment she stands there, looking at him, feeling as though there is something she should do, something she should say. In the end she turns and walks away.

He holds the mug between his hands, feeling the heat in a numb sort of way. He feels the heat, but it doesn't touch him, doesn't reach through the ice that he is in. His hand reaches to the side for a packet of sugar, the movement trained from years of sitting in diners just like this, of drinking cups of coffee exactly like this one. His hand stills, white sugar packet caught between two fingers, and he is hit so suddenly that his breath just rushes out of him.

_Dean_.

He drops the sugar packet and lifts the mug to his lips; the strong, bitter coffee races down his throat and he closes his eyes. He takes his coffee with lots of sugar and lots of cream, trying to turn the coffee into something else. But Dean always took it straight, black, just the way it was. He didn't try to change it.

The bitter taste in his mouth deepens and the mug tumbles from his hands. It hits the checkered-table, cracks, and its contents spill across the black-and-white plain, an endless flood of brown.

He stares, hands trembling.

"It's okay, sir. I've got it." The waitress says, sweeping a napkin across the spill, soaking it up. She looks at him, smiling in a way that she hopes is comforting.

His head moves up and his eyes catch hers and the smile freezes on her lips.

Those eyes should be beautiful, she thinks. They are hazel, largely gold flecked with green, a beautiful color. But they are cold. No, not so much cold as lifeless, abandoned. As if he is nothing more than a shell with no soul left inside. His eyes are completely devoid of hope.

She has never seen eyes like that, and they scare her.

"Sorry." He says. "I'm sorry."

She knows that he isn't talking about the coffee.

"Are you okay, sir?" She says, trying to hide her shaking voice.

"No." He shakes his head and sucks in a breath. His eyes move away from her, turn to stare out the window. "It's amazing, you know."

She doesn't say anything, just watches him the way she would watch a rabid animal, afraid that he might suddenly turn and attack.

"It's amazing how you can fight so long, and so hard. You can win. You can save everyone except for the person who means the most. You can save the world, but you lose your part of it. Everyone else gets to live, but you suffer because it is _your _fault." His voice is so heavy, so bitter, like the coffee still lingering on his tongue.

He looks at her, shakes his head. "I'm sorry." He seems to crumble, seems to disintegrate right in front of her. He bends in half, forehead pressing to the table's surface. He is motionless, except for the rise and fall of his chest, except for the movement of his lips as he mouths words that she doesn't understand.

She takes a step back, putting distance between them. She doesn't know and she doesn't understand and she can't deal with the broken form of a person in front of her.

"I tried." He whispers. "I tried to bring him back. Just like last time. No one would deal. Nothing worked. _He's gone_." The last words are nothing more than a hiss of air that means the world to him and means nothing to her.

From outside there is ferocious barking, that makes the hair on her arms quiver and stand upright, raising goose-bumps all over her body. A change comes over the man; he straightens, lifting his head slowly. When he turns to look at her his eyes are dark, not golden and green but almost, _almost_, black. There is a strange kind of grin on his lips, the grin of a man who knows his death is on the wind.

"Are you the only one here?"

"N-No." She cannot help but shake; the look in his eyes is madness without hope. "The cook too."

"Both of you need to leave." He orders. In his voice there is unshakable authority, a sense of force that cannot be denied. "Now." He turns his head away from her and faces the window. "They're coming for me."

She backs away.

"We stopped them." He says. "And this is their final petty revenge. We stopped them. And now they send their hounds to drag me down." She catches a glimpse of his reflection in the dark window; his bruised, tired, broken expression has been transformed into a visage of fiendish delight, of grim certainty.

"Run. Take the cook, get in your car, and drive away. Don't look back."

The barking is louder, fierce and vicious snarling that sounds as though it is right outside. But she peers out the window and sees nothing out of the ordinary sees nothing but an old black car with a shattered windshield and dented bumper parked outside.

"_Go_."

The man's eyes are on her and she shudders, turns away, runs for the back. He hears arguing from the kitchen and then the sound of a door slamming. A car engine starts and there is the peal of tires against the asphalt.

He sits alone in the diner, hands on the checkered table-top, facing the darkness outside.

_Dean_.

_I'm coming._

He closes his eyes. The barking is loud. He can hear the snarling, the click of fangs. He can smell the hot, rancid breath of the hellhounds. He hears the glass shatter, feels their teeth rip into him as they toss him around like a rag doll, as they feast.

He doesn't fight.

He's lost everything worth fighting for.

* * *


	2. Dean

A/N: And here's the second part to this little two-shot. In this Dean has lost Sam and everyone's favorite angel makes an appearance. You'll notice that a lot of the lines are the same, up to the point where Dean takes things a different direction. The diner is the same, as is the waitress, Lydia, but some of the descriptions are different because it is Dean's view of the world. Please let me know if I made any grammatical errors or errors in tense (you wouldn't believe how many times I was writing and realized that I switched tenses five paragraphs before). Enjoy and remember that reviews are love!

Disclaimer: Much as I would like to claim Supernatural as mine, my name is not Eric Kripke.

_II_

_Dean_

He limps into the diner, the bell on the door clanging cheerfully over his head. He slides into the nearest booth, his head down.

The waitress glides over. "Hello, sir. I'm Lydia and I'll be your server." She's pretty, with curly brown hair and a nice figure. His eyes run over her out of habit, because in another lifetime he would have smiled, winked, flirted. Now all he can do is try and muster a smile that falls flat and dead. "Would you like to hear our specials? Or would you like to look at the menu for a few minutes first?"

"Coffee, thanks." He says, his voice rough and scratchy. His throat is sore from screaming and it shows. "That's it."

"Right away." She says. She gives him a smile that he would have taken to heart before.

But that was all in another lifetime.

She walks away to get the coffee and he stares at the checkered-print of the table. He stares at the black and white boxes and watches as they move, watches as they blend together, watches as they transform into something else entirely.

She places the white mug in front of him and pours the hot, dark liquid. "Do you need anything else, sir?"

"No thanks." His voice is dark and quiet. He looks at her, holds her gaze for a moment, and tries again to smile, but this smile too lies dead and broken upon his lips, a twisted memory of what once was. She pauses for a moment, as though held there by some force, and then she bobs her head and walks away.

He holds the mug between his hands, feeling the burning heat. He lifts it to his lips, drinking down the bitter, scorching liquid with no regard for his tongue, for his throat. He doesn't feel the heat any more.

He looks to the side and sees the square white container, neatly stacked with little packets. White for sugar, pink for Sweet-and-Low, yellow for Splenda. He reaches out and plucks a white packet—it always had to be real sugar, not any of that sweetener crap—out of its resting place, holding it in his palm, staring. His hand contracts around the little white packet and he brings it to his lips, holding it there, a dam against the flood that overwhelms him.

_Sam. _

Seized by violence he rips open the packet and watches the white stream of crystals fall into his coffee, dissolving in the heat. He rips open another and another, until there is a pile of discarded packets on the table beside him and a mound of dissolving sugar at the bottom of his cup. He lifts the mug to his lips and closes his eyes at the sugary substance that races down his throat.

_How can you drink it like that? _

_How can you drink yours without anything in it? _

_Bitch._

_Jerk. _

With shaking hands he sets the mug on the table. The mug is white, just like the sugar packets, just like the white squares on the table top.

He doesn't have to look up to know that there is someone sitting across from him, and he doesn't have to look up to know who it is.

"Bring him back."

"I can't."

He raises his eyes to stare across at the angel-possessed man. He searches for any sign of regret, of remorse, of softness in the angel's face. He finds none. Angels, apparently, do not feel guilt; do not know the meaning of regret. They are too wound up in their high and mighty _purpose_.

He leans forward, hand wrapped around the mug, the other gripping the edge of the table.

_"Bring him back." _

Castiel leans forward, his eyes dark, his expression fixed. "I _can't_." He says again. "I can't, Dean."

He sits back, and then violently seizes the mug, raises it, smashes it to the tiled ground. It shatters into a dozen white shards, the dark brown liquid splattering the tiles, the half-disintegrated mound of sugar sitting limp where it landed. He sees the waitresses eyes widen, sees her mouth part, sees her scurry into the back.

"Bring him back!" He roars, trying to fill himself with violent rage and finding nothing within himself but a growing sense that everything is lost.

"I can't." Castiel says, his voice neither louder nor softer, just irrevocably the same. The same, unchanging, almost bored tone that has the power to destroy every last bit of hope within his soul.

He sinks back into his seat, staring, slumping down. His shoulders bend, his head droops.

"Why?"

"This is over, Dean. We won. There is no great threat to humanity anymore. There power is broken. I, and my brothers, are leaving."

"Bring him back." The words have been reduced to a monotone of pleas, to a rote of words that mean everything to him and nothing to the man sitting across from him.

"I can't. There is no turning back from this point. What has been undone in the past can no longer be undone. The world, as it stands now, is final. The dead must stay dead."

He sits there, staring, and the world presses around him. The last kernel of hope in him dies, and with it dies every sense of who he is or was. He stares at the angel with dark eyes, eyes devoid of hope, devoid of anger, devoid of everything except regret.

"What good are you, then?"

He sees the startled expression race across the angel's face. In another lifetime, it would have amused him, to realize that an angel actually could be startled. Now the humor falls into the black hole that has grown inside of him and is lost.

"What?"

He leans forward, arms on the table. "What good are you? What good are you, _angel_, if you couldn't save the most important thing in the world?"

"The most important thing, Dean, was saving the world."

He shakes his head. "No. Because we lost the one thing most important, the one person most worth saving. I lost him and you lost him, and you won't even bring him back."

"Dean, if I could bring him back—."

He slams his hands down on the table. "If, if, _if. _You brought me back, now bring him."

"_I can't._"

He sits there and stares at the checkered table-top, at the little white square, like white sugar packets, surrounded by the black squares that close in, blocking the white it, containing it, destroying it.

"Then send me back."

He sees that expression of surprise flit across the angel's face again.

"No. Dean, you have done good work for the Lord—."

His hands curl into fists. "Send me back, Castiel, or I'll send myself."

The angel watches him, lips pressed together. "I will not send you back."

He reaches behind him, tugs his shirt up, pulls the heavy metal pistol out of the waistband of his jeans. He is never unprepared, never unarmed. He presses the barrel against his temple, finger unshaken on the trigger.

"Dean, don't do this."

He looks at the angel, and his eyes aren't green anymore. They are dark, dark, _almost black_, because he has lost something so vitally important and there are no reset buttons anymore, no second chances. This is the end of the game and there are no more lives to be squandered away.

"It's funny, how you can save everyone except the most important one. No matter how hard you try, that person just slips through your fingers. And it's you against the world. It's you just trying to survive. And then, when you have survived, you look around and realize that there's nothing worth surviving for."

"I could stop you."

For a half-second his lips quirk into a smirk that once graced the face of a man so violently alive and so violently fighting for that survival. "But you won't." He says.

_Sammy. _

_I'm coming. _

He closes his eyes and his finger pulls the trigger, the way it has a thousand times.

A woman's scream chases him down as the dark things close around him, choking him, slashing him, destroying him bit by bit.

He keeps his eyes closed and abandons himself to the darkness and the torment. He doesn't scream and he doesn't fight, just swallows his brother's name when it bubbles in his throat.

They can't hurt him.

He is already destroyed.


End file.
